Melucci, Alberto & Avritzer, Leonardo - Complexity, Cultural Pluralism and Democracy - Collective Action in the Public Space (Article) 2000

Trends and developments

Courants et tendances

Alberto Melucci and Leonardo Avritzer

Complexity, cultural pluralism and democracy:Complexity, cultural pluralism and democracy:collective action in the public spacecollective action in the public space

Abstract. This article is an attempt to show the political consequences of the formsof collective action introduced by social movements and their contribution to theformulation of a new conception of democratic practice. It is our contention that thecurrent crisis faced by democracy is linked to the lack of a space capable of dealingwith both social complexity and cultural pluralism. We argue that a public space forface-to-face interaction among citizens differentiated from the state allows us toconsider this issue in a different light. Publicity allows the incorporation intodemocratic politics of demands for cultural integration by preserving a space for theirdirect presentation. Publicity also avoids a reductionist conception of political claimsin which, in order for representation to take place, there is the need to reduce theplurality of the cultural demands through the aggregation of political majorities.In this article we show the tension between the public space and politicalrepresentation, and argue that the de®nition of democracy in complex societies shouldinclude two further freedoms: the freedom not to belong as the right to withdraw fromone's constituted identity in order to form a new one, and the freedom not to berepresented. Such acts, which are non-aggregative par excellence, cannot be managed bythe system of representation, but only through mechanisms of public presentation andacknowledgement of difference. In our view the tension between the political and thepublic should become part of the de®nition of democracy.

Key words. Belonging ± Complexity ± Cultural pluralism ± Public space ±Representation ± Social movements

Social Science Information & 2000 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and NewDelhi), 39(4), pp. 507±527.

0539-0184[200012]39:4;507±527;015180

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Introduction: dilemmas of complexity and cultural pluralism

Democracy in contemporary complex societies is still understood asa system of regulated competition for material resources and repre-sentation. On its political side, different offers are made for the dis-tribution of material resources in the form of public goods providedby health, education and other social policies. On its electoral side,societal cleavages are aggregated through the formation of feasiblemajorities (Downs, 1956; Bobbio, 1984; Sartori, 1987). This system,which has worked for most of the post-war period, is now in deepcrisis. Contemporary democracies are being paralysed by the reac-tion to their promises for political inclusion. They are also beingchallenged by the fact that more and more citizens do not see theplurality of moral values growing out of complexity adequatelyrepresented through the available system of aggregation of majori-ties. Institutions designed to deliberate on behalf of majoritiesbecome completely out of tune with the plural moral conceptionsof a signi®cant part of the population. As a consequence, thedecision-making capacity of political institutions decreases due totheir inability to channel new moral issues and non-economicneeds through the decision-making process. Democracy is in crisisbecause, on the one hand, the requirements of cultural pluralismproper to complexity are seldom met in the process of politicalaggregation while, on the other, there is a growing feeling that poli-tical decision interferes with the autonomy of people's qualitativeneeds and life projects.The growing consensus among social and political scientists on

this legitimization crisis and the decreased decision-making capacityof political institutions coincides with the inability of the best-established theories in political science and sociology ± democraticelitism within political science and resource mobilization theory insociology ± to incorporate the public forms of action introducedby contemporary social movements (Melucci, 1980, 1985, 1989,1996a; Cohen, 1985; Offe, 1985). The type of collective action thatstarted emerging in the late 1960s in complex societies representsthe most important response to the dilemmas of complexity andcultural pluralism because it provided the possibility of addressingboth of them through a rede®nition of the form of the politicalitself: instead of following the aggregation logic proper to thepolitical system, social movements introduced, at the political level,the dimension of the direct and public presentation of moral and

508 Social Science Information Vol 39 ± no 4

non-material claims. Many contemporary forms of collective actiondo not demand to have their claims incorporated into the politicalsystem but instead propose new values and moral concerns andintroduce these into the public culture. Social movements addressthe challenge of complexity and its two-sided nature (integrationvs participation, quantity vs quality) by showing that contemporarysociety is governed by both a systemic logic of integration and whatwe could call a logic of cognitive mobilization (Eyerman, 1991).Contemporary social movements show individuals' capacity to actcollectively as a response to systemic interference with the environ-ment, to scienti®c developments leading to the inner control oftheir bodies, to the expansion of informational systems that interferewith privacy. Thus social movements offer a different way ofbridging the gap between complexity and democracy by utilizingthe new qualitative needs created by complexity to expand theboundaries of the political. But social movements also representthe most adequate answer to the challenge of cultural pluralism,which exposes democracy to the risk of paralysis (see the post-modernist charge that democracy is subjected to con¯icts causedby competing cultural principles). Social movements introduce acomplementary form of dealing with politics: they supplement theprinciple of representation with the principle of belonging. By trans-forming the fact of belonging to different cultural groups into apolitical issue, social movements offer a different solution to theway cultural pluralism and democracy can be bridged. Belongingdiffers from representation in so far as it is direct, whereas represen-tation is indirect. Belonging tends to present itself in public as thataspect of social life which is irreducible to representation. Becauseof the tension between representation and belonging, social move-ments suggest that democracy in complex societies should ®ndnew channels for directly presenting moral forms of life which arenot in the majority and yet demand acknowledgement.

This article has one main contention, namely, that the publicsphere constitutes an alternative political space for direct presenta-tion of plural identities and claims. The concept of a public spaceinvolves the idea of a space for face-to-face interaction amongcitizens that is differentiated from the state. In this space, individualsand groups interact with one another, debate the actions taken bythe political authority, argue about the moral adequacy of privateconditions of domination, make demands to the political authorityand present identities in public. We will argue that the public

Melucci and Avritzer Trends and developments 509

space conceived in this way becomes a second form of politicalspace, which is occupied by actors who choose not to have theiridentities represented. We believe that the concept of publicizationhelps to establish a distinction between two dimensions withinsuch democracies, which are intimately related but also in constanttension. The ®rst, the public sphere, we consider as the space thatallows the formation of solidarities, the public presentation ofidentities and new issues and the formation of informal networksof communication (Habermas, 1994; Melucci, 1996a). The other,the political system, we understand as that level of the social struc-ture where decisions are made. The political system has four mainactivities: the reduction of demands; the competition and negotia-tion among different demands; the articulation of solutions; andthe decision itself. The form of differentiation between the publicand the political proposed in this article leads to a different way ofconceiving the growing complexity of the political. Instead of pro-posing to cope with complexity by reduction of demands and iden-tities made by political representation, we will suggest a differentresponse: the direct presentation of demands and identities in thepublic by those actors who choose not to have their identitiesprocessed by the system of representation.In the ®rst of our four sections, we elaborate on the insuf®ciency

of the response made by the best-established theory within politicalscience ± the democratic elitist tradition ± to the challenge of com-plexity. We argue that the attempt to narrow the scope of partici-pation does not provide an adequate response to the growingcomplexity of modern political issues because it cannot addressthe new forms of social exclusion based on the unequal access tosymbolic goods. It leaves the political realm unable to tackle sym-bolic and cultural issues. In the second section, we show howresource mobilization theory (RMT) ± the best-established theoryon social movements ± is unable to break with the general frame-work proposed by democratic elitism. RMT reconciles rationalitywith collective action by explaining how the claims advanced bysocial movements can be understood as demands for political inclu-sion and therefore should be considered to be a rational way topursue social integration. In the third section, we analyse the rela-tionship between social complexity, cultural pluralism and politicsbased on the form of public action adopted by social movements.We contend that a conception of collective action associated withthe idea of publicization has the capacity to deal with both issues.


Publicity allows the direct presentation of claims. It also avoids areductionist conception of political claims: issues such as free time,leisure space, free speech, free participation and identity formationconstitute the centre of the public space. In the ®nal section of thearticle, we argue for the necessity of a leap in democratic systemsand we sketch the possibility of bridging the gap between thepolitical system and the public sphere through the capacity ofdemocracy to turn new identities and themes from private intopublic issues.

Democratic elitist tradition and participation

The post-war consensus on democratic participation was the resultof the displacement of the social science centre from Europe toNorth America. Joseph Schumpeter's Capitalism, Socialism andDemocracy (1942) is in this respect paradigmatic, since the authorhimself substituted the United States for Europe both as a placeto live and as an object of re¯ection. From the inter-war Europeancontext, Schumpeter brought the concern of how to make democ-racy compatible with rationality. His diagnosis of the problemsfaced by contemporary democracies was based on their inabilityto respond to two problems. The ®rst was the contradiction betweensovereignty and cultural pluralism. Schumpeter regarded as a ®ctionthe understanding of popular sovereignty as

every member of the community, conscious of that goal, knowing his or her mind,

discerning what is good or what is bad, taking part actively and responsibly in

furthering the former and ®ghting the latter and all members taking together

control of their affairs. (Schumpeter, 1942: 250)

For him, this idea is a ®ction because of the plurality of conceptionsof the common good present in a given population. Already in 1942the author of Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy was aware of thecultural particularities involved in different conceptions of thecommon good and thought that they should be left out of the demo-cratic debate, thereby excluding substantive issues from the politicalrealm.

The second problem addressed by Schumpeter was the relation-ship between participation and rationality. He approached thisproblem by pointing out the in¯uence of mass society on the forma-tion of rational individual attitudes about politics. He maintained


that communication media transform the rational collective dis-cussion characteristic of modern politics into crowd behaviour.

Newspaper readers, radio audiences, members of a party even if not physically

gathered together are terribly easy to work up into a psychological crowd and

into a state of frenzy in which attempt at rational argument only spurs the

animal spirit. (Schumpeter, 1942: 257)

In other words, the collective forms characteristic of modern politicsare susceptible to a potentially dangerous degeneration (an argu-ment common to Freud, crowd psychology and Kornhauser's[1959] theory of mass society).On the basis of these two diagnoses, Schumpeter proposed to

narrow the scope of democratic systems. Democracy should notseek to be rational discussion of the common good, because societyis too divided and because discussion can easily lead to mass mani-pulation. In an attempt to avoid these dangers, Schumpeter lookedfor an alternative form of democratic government, and proposed thetransformation of sovereignty into a method for the selection ofelites: ``the role of the people is to produce a government or elsean intermediate body which in turn will produce a rational executiveor government'' (Schumpeter, 1942: 269). Schumpeter's intentionwas clear: to narrow the scope of democracy in order to save itfrom the irrationality of mass politics and the unavoidable con¯ictsover cultural values and moral rules.Schumpeter's proposal for democratic organization became

widely accepted in the post-war period, even in Europe.1 One Italianthinker, Norberto Bobbio, reconnected the democratic elitisttradition with the debates on the meaning of sovereignty and theforms of management of the economy as they were approached byboth the left and the liberals in Europe. Bobbio approached thegap between democracy as popular sovereignty and democracy asa rule for the selection of government in terms of `ùnful®lled pro-mises'', that is to say, with ideas proper to the democratic traditionand yet impossible to ful®l in complex societies. Like Schumpeterand Weber, he claimed that ``the project of political democracywas conceived for a society much less complex than the one thatexists today'', which faces unforeseen obstacles arising from theincreasing complexity of both the economy and the administrativestate (Bobbio, 1984: 37). Bobbio's approach to unful®lled promisesis clearly linked to the problem of complexity. For him, the growthin administrative complexity and technical education contradicts


the pursuit of participatory democracy. These processes expand thedomain of technocrats instead of the autonomy of the commoncitizen: ``Technocracy and democracy are antithetical: if the expertplays a leading role in the industrial society he cannot be consideredas just any citizen. The hypothesis which underlies democracy is thatall are in a position to make decisions about everything'' (Bobbio,1984: 37). Hence Bobbio, in the same fashion as Schumpeter, pro-poses reduction of the scope for decision-making in order to makedemocracy compatible with the growing complexity of modernsocieties. There is a common strain in Schumpeter's and Bobbio'sarguments: both authors acknowledge that the transition to amodern and highly differentiated society implies many gains butalso a sharp political loss, expressed in the inevitable necessity ofnarrowing the scope of political participation. The trend establishedby Schumpeter in the United States and Bobbio in Europe set astandard for democratic theory. Contemporary authors such asSartori and Dahl operate within this framework either by conceivingdemocracy as the government of the `àctive minorities'' (Sartori,1987: I. 147) or by assuming that political incorporation can takeplace by the inclusion of new groups into the representation system(Dahl, 1990).

Democratic elitism centres its case for narrowing democraticparticipation on the necessity of lowering the risks tied to the grow-ing complexity and cultural pluralism of modern societies. Itassumes that the proliferation of elements which follows fromcultural pluralism cannot be dealt with by an increase in partici-pation, but only through a reduction of the variables involved(Luhmann, 1982). Thus in order to deal with social complexity thepolitical sub-system needs to reduce its capacity to respond to theoutside environment by narrowing its responses to a less thanone-to-one relation. Representation through the aggregation ofmajorities appears to be the most feasible solution. Representationreduces the complexity of the political decision-making process,ensuring that decisions will continue to be made in spite of theincrease in the number of elements to be coped with. Thus theresponses that democratic elitism has been able to give to the prob-lems of complexity and cultural pluralism are based on the assump-tion that the replacement of direct participation by representationconstitutes an adequate answer to both problems. Yet both answersdraw on a one-sided conception of complexity and culturalpluralism. On the one hand, complexity cannot be dealt with simply


by reducing the number of variables involved in order to processthem through the system of representation. While the number ofmaterial demands can be narrowed with only partial losses (someactors may of course lose more than others), the reduction of thenumber of cultural claims or claims for identity leads to the exclu-sion or even the cancellation of one actor's social existence. Onthe other hand, cultural pluralism cannot be dealt with merely bydissociating democracy from substantive considerations and attach-ing it to formal procedures for the selection of leadership (Taylor,1994) because the aggregation of majorities might itself become asource of profound inequality as far as people's identity is concerned(Young, 1990).Democratic elitism espouses a one-sided conception of complexity

and cultural pluralism by advocating an ad hoc reduction of partici-pation. Social movements show that increased participation couldprovide a different answer to both issues (Avritzer, 1996). Theenvironmental movement, for instance, provides a good exampleof how the multiplication of actors involved in dealing withendangered species and land-cleaning provided solutions to thecomplexity issue through the multiplication of actors involved. Inthe case of Chesapeake Bay, the involvement of a broad range ofactors such as residents, farmers and business people led to the intro-duction of multiple environmental designs involving social actorsshowing a greater capacity to deal with complex issues such asreduction of nutrient loadings. At the same time, bureaucraticforms of dealing with the same issues through the administrativesystem could propose only one standard organizational solutionto all kinds of environmental problems and were unable to reviseproblematic targets (Sabel et al., 1999). Thus reduction of socialcomplexity to technocratic administration reduces the capacity ofthe political system to cope with the multiplicity of situationsinvolved in dealing with the environment. In this case, socialaction has one main characteristic: the increase in a form of partici-pation which entails direct involvement in decision-making. Suchcharacteristics, which are also shared by the anti-AIDS movement(Gamson, 1989) and by third-world urban social movements(Olvera, 1997), have led social theorists to look at the relationshipbetween growing complexity and political representation in a newway. Yet the next section of the article will show how the contem-porary leading approach to the study of collective action, RMT,in its attempt to reconnect complexity and participation, does not


break with the democratic elitist tradition and is therefore unable toprovide an adequate solution to both issues.

Rationality, participation and social aggregation: RMT and thepolitical realm

Resource mobilization theory represents the de®nitive attemptwithin sociological theory to overcome psychological assumptionsabout the irrationality of collective action. RMT emerged with theclear intention of putting aside grievances and deprivations ± themain elements of the post-war theoretical consensus ± in the analysisof collective action. Its manifest aim was to remove social move-ments theory from the rationality/irrationality debate by pointingout that social movements emerge and develop through a structureof various kinds of incentives (Zald and Ash, 1966). Strains andgrievances are ruled out because ``there is always enough discontentin any society to supply the grassroots support for a movement''(Turner and Killian, 1972; McCarthy and Zald, 1977). The problemis how effectively to organize this discontent as an act of socialaggregation performed by rational actors. For RMT, the aggrega-tion of individual actors into some form of collective action is atask whose success or failure depends upon two variables: the costor bene®t of acting and the resources available for doing so.

RMT's point of departure is Mancur Olson's argument that only`à tied sale of collective and non-collective goods . . . could stimulatea rational individual in a large group to bear part of the cost ofobtaining a collective good'' (Olson, 1965: 134). RMT presentssocial action as a dispute oriented towards the distribution ofpublic goods whose value can be calculated. This leads it to showhow resources and opportunities are central to understanding collec-tive action and to specify in structural terms the conditions underwhich mobilization takes place (Tilly, 1986, 1997). In short, resourcemobilization tries to transform Homo sociologicus into Homoeconomicus in order to reduce the problem of collective action to``how people organise, pool resources and wield them effectively''(Fireman and Gamson, 1979: 9). By turning Olson's argumentinto a broad framework for linking collective action and the utiliza-tion of resources, modern and non-modern forms of collectiveaction are made equivalent: prophets, politicians, businesses andvoluntary associations are reduced to a common denominator of


resourceful actors whose skills and connections can be used todeliver incentives and aggregate actors (Fireman and Gamson,1979). Collective action occurs whenever actors ®nd themselvesentering a political system or exiting from it. Those already locatedwithin a political system de®ne its rules of membership, wieldingthe power at their disposal to keep outsiders out. This exclusionaryaction provokes processes of mobilization and even violence onthe part of those seeking to penetrate the system. The attempt ofresource mobilization to remove collective action from therationality/irrationality debate leads to a de®nition of social actorsbased on their relation to the political system: they are eitherresourceful or resourceless, included or excluded. Thus collectiveactors' drive for inclusion can be considered a rational collective act.RMT also involves an attempt to set the structural conditions for

collective action by making modern politics a sort of invariant pointof reference. The forms of national politics which emerged in themodern era, the proactive movements for rights and politicalinclusion are all considered to be the result of structural changesin the market and the state. A structural explanation is intertwinedwith a utilitarian account of rationality according to which ``thecreation of a bureaucratic, capitalist, specialised world dominatedby powerful governments, large organisations and big cities . . .amounts to fundamental changes in the interests, organisationsand opportunities that together govern the intensity and characterof collective action'' (Tilly, 1986: 77). Tilly's remarks introduce astructural component necessary for the cost/bene®t evaluation ofcollective action. Both the modern capitalist economy and themodern state create exclusion and at the same time conditions formembership, making the collective act of challenging such con-ditions a rational act.The basic analytical elements proper to the democratic elitist

tradition are imported by RMT in order to evaluate the rationalityof the forms of collective action adopted by social movements.Social actors are rational because they mobilize not because ofgrievances or psychological drives but according to a cost/bene®tcalculation. Thus the elements introduced by the democratic elitisttradition to postulate individual rationality are not denied(Downs, 1956; Olson, 1965; Morris and Mueller, 1992); instead,their scope is broadened to show that acting collectively mightalso be rational.


Since social movements deliver collective goods, few individuals will on their own

bear the costs of working to obtain them. Explaining collective behavior requires

detailed attention to the selection of incentives, cost-reducing mechanisms or

structures, and carrier bene®ts that lead to collective behavior. (McCarthy and

Zald, 1977: 1218)

The same argument holds for political inclusion. Thus, for Tilly,`èvery polity . . . collectively develops tests of membership.Challengers acquire membership in the polity by meeting the testdespite the fact that members characteristically resist new admis-sions and employ the government resources to make admissionsmore dif®cult'' (Tilly, 1997: 121). Here RMT tends to transformmodern political systems into an invariant structure which isassumed to explain all collective attempts of political incorporationas rational collective acts.

The cost/bene®t calculation utilized by the democratic elitisttradition is extended by RMT to the arena of collective action inorder to narrow the risks of `ìrrational'' political participation.This attempt faces a major problem: the reduction of rationalityto the struggle for a better distribution of material bene®ts(wealth, income, etc.).2 RMT overlooks the fact that many of theissues around which contemporary social movements have beenorganized involve not the extension of material resources to theresourceless but rather the acknowledgement of one's condition.Politics involves a struggle for self-naming as well as for thechange in the way social actors are portrayed (Jenson, 1995). Inmany recent social movements, one can see the central role ofthis kind of action. Gamson (1992) showed how the way previousinjustice was portrayed by the media became an issue of centralimportance to the civil rights movement. Social movements establisha relationship with collective action that cannot be explained interms of pure cost/bene®t calculation. This poses a fundamentalchallenge to the way democratic elitism and RMT understandcollective rationality. Both approach the rationality of collectiveaction in terms of its capacity or incapacity to acquire publicgoods and representation. Yet the central political characteristic ofmany recent movements is the fact that their economic and politicaldemands are mixed with the challenge to the very code of politicalincorporation through representation. Social movements such asthe peace movement or movements for the democratization of thepolitical system in Latin America (Avritzer, 1996; Olvera, 1997;Peruzzotti, 1997) root their political action in a novel relation with


political rules and procedures, thus affecting their very form. Thisnew relation to the political system connects such movements forpolitical renewal to a type of action aiming at forms of account-ability and openness proper to the public space. Through theiraction, they suggest the need to make the political system compatiblewith the process of presentation of difference in public. Hence, thepostulation of rationality attributed solely to actions seeking repre-sentation falls short of addressing the need of a sphere for thepresentation of difference (Pizzorno, 1979). In the next section, wepresent a framework for understanding this speci®c dimension ofsocial movements.

The two-sided nature of complexity and cultural pluralism: socialmovements and politics

Our de®nition of social movements is entirely analytical and aims toconceptually separate speci®c forms of collective action fromphenomena that are empirically contiguous and mixed with theformer. We conceive of collective action in terms of the orientationsof action and the speci®c system of social relationships affected bythe action itself (Melucci, 1989, 1996a). We reserve the term``social movements'' to designate a form of collective action whichhas three characteristics: (1) the formation of solidarity; (2) thepublic presentation of an existing con¯ict; (3) the breach of thelimits of compatibility of the system within which the action takesplace. Each of these characteristics, when applied to contemporaryforms of collective action, allows a new way of dealing with culturalpluralism and social complexity, which in our view overcomes someof the dif®culties encountered by the democratic elitist tradition orby RMT.

Solidarity

Solidarity as an objective of action is a feature shared by many con-temporary movements. Social movements reinterpret the meaningof social solidarity by transferring its formation from the privateto the public realm. Primeval solidarity meant the capacity to dealwith issues such as ethnicity, locality and age, at the private level.As social solidarity moves from the private to the public domain


(Hegel, 1821; Durkheim, 1986) it changes its form of operation.Within contemporary societies, solidarity involves the self-re¯exiveact of identifying a common condition with a distant other(Giddens, 1994; Beck, 1997). The nature of such an act is essentiallypublic and challenges the attempt by the ruling groups whoelaborate political codes to reduce complexity and impose names.Solidarity entails maintaining the plurality of social action againstthe system's homogenizing effect. Social movements provide uswith good examples of such attempts. Urban social movements inLatin America, such as the shantytown movements in Santiago orSaÄ o Paulo, changed the identity associated with being an inhabitantof a poor neighbourhood in a Latin American city. They built a newidentity of a citizen entitled to rights and social services (Oxhorn,1995; Doimo, 1995). Such an identity involved the encouragementof participation and the pursuit of organizational autonomy fromthe state and political mediators (Doimo, 1995). In the UnitedStates, the anti-AIDS movement operated with a similar logic,trying to produce a new meaning for the notion of patient.Gamson (1989) showed how movements such as the Aids Coalitionto Unleash Power (ACT-UP) challenged the technical decision onAIDS treatment. ACT-UP pushed for greater access to treatmentand drugs and challenged decision-making on who should beincluded in new drug trials. It assigned a new meaning to the ideaof patient, linking it to an active connotation. Acts of publicizationby social movements are an attempt to stress the cognitive side ofcomplexity, that is to say they involve the af®rmative act ofnaming in a different way, an act not prone to be processed throughcomplexity-reduction strategies. Publicization is the demonstrationof a different political answer to the unwillingness of social move-ments to present their demands to the system of representation.

Public presentation of con¯ictual issues

With the increase in contemporary societies' information resources,the capacity of individuals to intervene in the symbolic orderexpands to take in the whole of society. Society acts on the systemas a whole, on individuals' symbolic capacities and on their personalresources for de®ning the meaning of their actions (Melucci, 1996b).In order for highly differentiated systems to be able to guaranteetheir internal integration (Parsons and Smelser, 1956; Luhmann,


1982; Zolo, 1992) it is necessary for them to extend their control overthe symbolic levels of action, so as to include in their scope thespheres where the meaning and motives of behaviour are consti-tuted. Thus con¯icts shift toward the new goals of re-appropriatingand reversing the meanings produced by distant and impersonalapparatuses. These large organizations adopt instrumental``rationales'' and tend to impose on individuals an identi®cationbased on these instrumental criteria. Antagonistic and con¯ictualdemands thematize issues such as time and space, birth and death,health and sickness, sexual identity and the control of communi-cative symbols. Social movements seek to re-appropriate suchthemes and assign them new meanings. The central characteristicof this process is its public dimension. Political rulers and eliteswhich produce dominant codes of behaviour try to reduce complex-ity by processing identity claims through the logic of representation.Social movements react by publicly exhibiting an identity or acondition not amenable to aggregation of majorities.A closer look at the con¯ictual forms of action adopted by

contemporary social movements reveals the difference between ouranalysis and that of RMT. Adopting a systemic view of the inter-changes between the economy and society and the political systemand society, RMT introduces collective action as an intermediateelement between the production and distribution of collectivegoods and the presentation and representation of political claims.Within this framework, the action of social movements is not seenas breaking with the dominant systemic logic, and RMT assumesthe possibility of incorporating and processing both economic andpolitical claims within the system. Thus, instead of accounting forthe speci®c forms of action proper to social movements, RMTopts for the narrow de®nition of rationality, which reduces politicalparticipation to actions seeking advantages within the politicalsystem. This strategy overlooks the formal innovations of socialmovements and thus fails to thematize their public dimension.Instead of taking advantage of the innovations produced by move-ments in ways of doing politics and proposing an extension of theparticipatory forms of democracy, RMT ends up reducing suchinnovations to the instrumental level of action. Such a strategy isunable, as the democratic elitist tradition, either to cope theoreti-cally with the growing crisis of cultural legitimacy at the politicallevel or to recognize the potential for political innovation that has


been introduced by social movements. In our view, social move-ments are characterized by breaching the limits of compatibility ofthe economic and the political systems. This breach expresses theneed to acknowledge the permanent tension between mechanismsof systemic integration and public arenas. The former operatethrough complexity reduction, whereas the latter allow the presenta-tion in public of an identity, a condition of exclusion, a new moralconcern. It is our contention that such a tension is inherent incontemporary democracies.

Collective action and democracy: the public role of socialmovements

If democracy is to keep its legitimacy, it needs to assume a differentform in complex, pluralistic societies. It has to create a space for soli-darity and public presentation within which social actors recognizethemselves and can be recognized for what they are or want to be.Such a space should further social actors' autonomy and capacityfor deliberation on complex issues (Bohman, 1996; Cohen andSabel, 1997). Strengthening this kind of space implies broadeningthe concept of democracy in order to link it not only with claimsfor material goods and rules for representation but also with thefreedom to construct spaces for recognition, the freedom to disputethe meaning of given identities and the freedom to innovate at thepolitical level.

These freedoms and rights entail a certain degree of reciprocaltension with the system of institutional representation. In order toreproduce itself, collective identity needs the reassurance of asocial space protected against control and free from repression.Such a space requires the existence of a set of rights guaranteeingfree expression, free assembly and free communication. In additionto rights, a public space for social action requires the establishmentof those processes and resources (organization, leadership, symbolicand ideological framing processes) which ensure the continuity ofdemands and allow the presentation and the confrontation ofideas with the rest of society. It is at this level that social movementsprovide an answer to the issues of complexity and cultural pluralism.By circulating information and pressuring administrative agencies,they challenge the process of administrative decision-making and


throw into question the conventional answer given to social com-plexity. They expose the fact that the administrative system'spossession of information does not justify its exclusive access todecision-making. Social movements cast doubts on the adminis-trative consequences of narrowing the political participation bypublicly challenging the neutrality of decision-making in such sensi-tive areas as health policies, family planning and environmentalpolicies. They thus create a space for parallel forms of deliberationby cultural publics.Social movements have been able to create fora which challenge

the exclusive access of technicians to decision-making. The threesocial movements mentioned in this article ± the environmentalmovement, the movement of AIDS activists and urban movementsin Latin America ± all challenged the exclusive access of techniciansto decision-making. The environmental movement showed in theChesapeake Bay case that direct participation by social actorsleads to multiple designs in environmental issues, whereas bureau-cratic designs are in¯exible; urban social movements in LatinAmerica have been successfully introduced into decision-makingon budget issues; anti-AIDS activists have successfully changedadministrative forms of dealing with drug licensing. All theseexamples show that social movements breach the limits of compat-ibility between complexity and political representation because theychallenge the consequences of limiting the access of social actors todecision-making fora on complex issues.Social movements also tackle the issue of cultural pluralism by

dissociating the freedom to belong from the freedom to be repre-sented. Belonging is not equivalent to representation and in a certainsense is its opposite. Belonging is direct, representation is indirect;belonging is the immediate enjoyment of the good that is identity,representation is that enjoyment deferred. Pluralism is betteraddressed through belonging than through representation becausecultural difference cannot be assimilated by the processes of identityaggregation proper to representation. For representation to takeplace, there is the need to reduce the plurality of the culturaldemands involved in the polity. Because of this tension, the de®ni-tion of democracy in complex societies should include two furtherfreedoms: the freedom not to belong as the right to withdrawfrom one's constituted identity in order to form a new one, andthe freedom not to be represented. Such acts, which are non-


aggregative par excellence, cannot be managed by the system ofrepresentation, but only through mechanisms of public presentationand acknowledgement of difference.

Non-authoritarian democracy in complex societies can succeedonly if it is able to accommodate these dualisms: administrativecomplexity vs public deliberation; the right to belong vs the rightto refuse to belong; the right to make one's voice heard vs theright to modify the conditions of being heard. The preconditionfor a non-authoritarian democracy is the autonomy of the politicalspace, a space which is itself a recent creation and a property ofcomplex societies. We call it a public space for re/presentation. Itis distinct from government institutions and state apparatuses, butit is part of the political realm. It extends beyond the political insti-tutions proper to embrace systems of public presentation, repre-sentation and decision-making diffused in society. The publicspace is characterized by its great variability. It may expand orshrink according to the degree of autonomy it is granted. It is byde®nition a ¯exible space which can be kept open only by a creativerelationship between collective actions and institutions. It is struc-turally ambivalent because it expresses the dual signi®cance of theterms ``representation'' and ``participation''. Representation ispresentative: that is, it advances demands and promotes interests.But it is also representative: it embodies a reality which remainsirreducibly different from it and often goes unnoticed. Similarly,participation signi®es both ``taking part in'', or acting to promoteone's interests and needs, and ``being part of'', as in belonging toa system and identifying with the general interests of the community.This insuperable ambivalence of the ``political'' both threatens andempowers creative action. It threatens creative action by reducingit to a general form of material and political inclusion. It empowersit by providing the conditions that make it unique and thusirreducible to equalization produced by aggregation of majorities.The political role of social movements in the public space ofre/presentation is to breach the limits of compatibility between pre-sentation and representation in order to challenge the attempt ofpolitical rulers to reduce presentation of difference to pure represen-tation. This tension leads to a contentious de®nition of the form ofthe political within contemporary societies.

Social movements have the capacity to occupy the public spacewithout losing their speci®city. The public space is the point of


tension between political institutions and public forms of presenta-tion, between the attempt to reduce complexity and the necessityto acknowledge pluralism by allowing the social dilemmas raisedby movements not to be erased by their institutional incorporation.The public space that emerged out of the bourgeois era is beingtransformed into a pluralistic and con¯ictual space which allowsmovements to contest the de®nition of what is political, that is ofwhat belongs to the polis. Its function is to broaden the code ofthe political by transforming what used to remain private into poli-tics as well as by re-politicizing what has been left out of the processof aggregation of majorities. The primary aim of the public space isto enable movements to bring to the public the issues they raise aswell as the political forms they practise. The creation of a spacefor the contentious de®nition of the political can enable society todeal with the tension between the public and the political using astrategy opposite to that of complexity reduction. Such a strategyinvolves the politicization of social dilemmas by transformingthem into issues which can only be addressed by recognizing theautonomy and the difference of social actors. By pointing out thenecessity of broadening public spaces, social movements connectnew issues with the renewal of the form of the political. They trans-form political representation and institutional decision-making intoone more viable political space and allow the institutional acknowl-edgement of a new space capable of giving voice to needs, issues andactors which until now remained outside the borders of the politicalsystem.

Alberto Melucci is Professor of Sociology at the University of Milan. He is the

author of many books, including Challenging Codes and The Playing Self, both

published in 1996 by Cambridge University Press. Author's address: 91 Corso di

Porto Romana, Milano 20122, Italy.

Leonardo Avritzer is Professor of Political Science at the Federal University of

Minas Gerais. His book The Morality of Democracy received the best book of

the year award from Anpocs (Brazilian Association of Sociologists and Political

Scientists) and is currently being translated into Spanish. Author's address: Rua

JoaÄ o Antonio Cardoso 305, apt. 101, Belo Horizonte 31310-390, Brazil.

[email: avritzer@fa®ch.ufmg.br]


Notes

1. There were, however, a few exceptions, most importantly Bachrach (1967),

Pateman (1970) and, more recently, Held (1987). Most of these authors, whose

common origin is the so-called ``New Left'', accepted part of the democratic elitist

argument but sought to complement it with the defence of forms of direct participa-

tion at the workplace level. For them, ``the opportunity for extensive participation in

areas like work would radically alter the context of national politics'' (Held, 1987:

261).

2. The cultural side of social movements has been recently incorporated by these

authors through the transformation of culture into an additional resource. In a

volume edited by Aldon Morris and Carol Mueller, the authors concede that

resource mobilization theory, as originally conceived, self-consciously mini-

mized the roles of ideas and beliefs and their elaboration. Like grievances, the

cultural con®gurations that legitimate and make collective action meaningful

were taken as givens. Recently, theorists found a starting point for addressing

cultural issues. (Morris and Mueller, 1992: 13)

Yet this starting-point entails understanding culture as a mobilizing factor sub-

ordinated to the exclusion/inclusion logic upon which resource mobilization based

its theory of collective action.

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Documents

Melucci, Alberto & Avritzer, Leonardo - Complexity, Cultural Pluralism and Democracy - Collective Action in the Public Space (Article) 2000